Morphology and surface properties of Cu thin film on Si (001)

Abstract In this work, molecular dynamics simulation was used to expect the effect of incident energy and substrate temperature on the morphology, surface roughness and structure of Cu thin film on Si (001) substrate. Our results indicate that the growth of Cu thin film depend clearly on the incident energy and substrate temperature. It was found that for lower incident energy, the morphology of deposited film is not smooth, and the film mixing is observed and limited to the top layer of substrate, it can be considered as quasi-epitaxial growth mode. Thus, the film-mixing mode is produced when the incident energy increases. In this case, the morphology of deposited film becomes smoother. In addition, the radial distribution function show that with increasing incident energy, the structure of the film deposited changes notably from crystalline structure to an amorphous structure one. As well, the surface roughness and length of film mixing are influenced by the substrate temperature. With the increase of substrate temperature, the surface roughness decreases whereas the length of film mixing increases.